Manuel Puig's 1976 Kiss of the Spider Woman, translated into English in 1979 and adapted as an Academy Award-winning film, expanded the idiom of the novel (mixing cinema, fiction, romance, and song) and challenged the third-person narration that was dominant in Latin American Boom fiction. Students are drawn to the conversational style of the novel and the melodramatic seductions of the tale, but they need guidance to appreciate the novel's richness as a work of literature. This volume of the MLA's Approaches to Teaching series suggests ways instructors can help students grasp the novel's exploration of state and sexual politics and discern the strategies of narration that underlie the conversations between the two main characters.